Hi Happy Scrappers,
Liana here, with a few words about using Photoshop Actions. When I first started in photography, I drooled over the photos that had that extra “oomph.” I could tell the photographer had done something to them in post-processing… popped the colors or eased them back into a vintage look. As I poked around and read tutorials, I learned about Photoshop Actions. Actions are little scripts that run in a specific order to do something to an image. To make them, you press the “record” button. Then you do whatever actions you want to capture (in order), and then save the collection. From then on, if you run your saved “action,” it will do the same thing to any image you have open. For instance, if I wanted to turn an image black and white and then sharpen it, I could press record and then turn my image b&w and sharpen it, then press stop and save. From then on, if I run that new action on a different image, it would do the exact same things to it, too. The good news is that some wonderfully creative folks have saved us lots of time by creating a bunch of actions and then offered them for sale. You purchase their actions, load them into Photoshop and then you can run them on your own images. Our own Gina Miller here at the Lilypad has created a freebie for folks to try, called “Cookie Dough.”
Here’s a before photo of my baby
and in a touch of a button, the action made it look like this:
Splendid Fiins also has a few actions. I tried “Retro Beach” on this image of my older daughter:
After playing the action, the image looked like this:
Actions are not just for changing the look of photographs. Valorie Wibbens created an action that turns any element into a sticker:
And Krista from Sahlin Studio created this brilliant little action that flattens, sharpens and saves for web in one click:
If you end up amassing lots of wonderful actions (as I have), I have two tips for you:
1. Duplicate the actions you like best and make a “favorites” folder that you keep at the top of the list so you don’t have to go hunting every time you need to use an action
2. Consider changing your mode to “button” mode. To me, it’s a lot easier to just press a button than to highlight an action and then press play.
Hope this helped give your photographs that extra something and saved you some time! Here’s a link to the actions section of our store for other great actions!
Courtney M says
So, since I’m a rule breaker, I downloaded the “Cookie Dough” action by Gina Miller – even though it says it won’t work with Photoshop Elements. I’m running PSE 11, and it worked just fine for me! I’m glad I tried it out anyway.